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IEC 61131-3 & Multi platform portability

IEC 61131-3 & Multi platform portability

IEC 61131-3 & Multi platform portability

(OP)
The company I work for provides furnaces and control products for the heat treating industry. Because we provide products worldwide and for many different clients we have to work with a bunch of different PLC platforms. This is a new situation for me, before this job I have never programmed the same application twice so this issue has never come up.
With the majority of PLC comapnnies now supporting the IEC 61131-3 programming standard, how portable are configurations? Can I export my POUs between platforms? I know I will likely have to remap the I/O and possibly rework the memory configuration, but I'm more so looking for reusing major operation blocks.

RE: IEC 61131-3 & Multi platform portability

They are far from compatible and certainly not portable!
There are some 1131/3 based packages such as ISaGRAF, ControlBuild and Codesys that can compile to more than one manufacturers PLC. I have no direct experience of them, but I suspect, based on earlier experience that they generate the code to lowest common denominator. And further that the support for online changes is diminished by this approach.
A better answer imho is to standarise your design, using 1131/3 concepts. If you have a good design the actual programming becomes simpler.
In fact, shameless plug, that is what ControlDraw is for.
Francis
www.controldraw.co.uk

RE: IEC 61131-3 & Multi platform portability

In some cases "Structured Text" is close and can be copied to multiple manufactures with only slight alterations. The other languages are very rarely even close.

RE: IEC 61131-3 & Multi platform portability

I always thought if you could do an ASCII import/export like AB does with the *.L5K file, then you could have a chance of going from one plc editor to another with ladder.

But a lot of them still are locked in there own world whether or not they say they are IEC compliant.

 

RE: IEC 61131-3 & Multi platform portability

IL and ST are already in text. IL and ST are the most protable of the IEC languages because on can cut and paste the code.  LD, FBD and SFC present a problem because they are graphical. I would use XML to describe LD, FBD and SFC. XML could provide a small wrapper for IL and ST too. When possible I would use IL or ST to define the operation of the internal workings of the LD and FBD blocks but I still think XML will be necesarry to describe the visual parts;  If anybody objected to the size of the XML file I would use a zipped XML format.  XML compresses well.









 

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